Question

In the stack-overflow question here , it was explained that you can remove emails with this code:

$pattern = "/[^@\s]*@[^@\s]*\.[^@\s]*/";
$replacement = "[removed]";
preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string); 

This removes stuff like [e-mail] – how do I modify the regular expression so that I remove something like @johnDoe from a chunk of text?

I really don’t understand regular expression that well.

Answer 1

use

$pattern = "/@[^@\s]*/";

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In [^@\s]:

• \s stands for any space character
• [@\s] stands for a character group, containing \s (i.e. space) and the @ character. it matches either @ or \s
• [^@\s] stands for the character group that is not @\s
• afterall, [^@\s] matches a single character that is not @ character or \s (i.e. spaces)

* after it stands for the previous token (i.e. [^@\s] here) can repeat zero or more times. Hence, [^@\s]* matches string of any length as long as it does not contain @ or \s

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As a side note, your link give a much-simplified regex for matching e-mails. The perfect way of matching e-mails are no simple matter.